All this Internet utopian cant about flattened, decentralized power networks—derived originally from corporate managerial theory, but that’s another depressing story—jibes nicely with one of the most enduring middle-class romantic dreams that we’ve inherited from the hippies and never quite shaken off: the dream of leaderless, horizontally-structured utopias in which power itself dissolves along with the old oppressive vertical hierarchies. It’s an enduring middle-class dream up to this day. If anything it’s grown stronger since the hippies turned their dream of horizontally-structured utopias into a series of disastrous real-world communes, before turning to corporate consulting about decentralizing corporate structures, a la Stewart Brand. This same romantic “horizontalism” framed the Occupy protests, both their spectacular start and their embarrassing failures; and more to the point, it’s the major premise in much of the cant you hear from cheerleaders for the Brave New Media.
Mark Ames
